Allergic to Populists--In Other Words, Elitist

Time Magazine on the new populism of Obama (and why Geithner isn't a part of it):

Shortly after Obama unveiled a $117 billion plan to tax the riskier liabilities of larger financial firms, Geithner hosted a dinner for bankers. A few of them grumbled about Big Government, class warfare and the unfairness of scapegoating financial institutions that already repaid their bailout money while GM and Chrysler keep hemorrhaging taxpayer cash. But one midsize-bank CEO suggested the tax was a reasonable surcharge on too-big-to-fail conglomerates that benefit from an implicit guarantee of federal help in a crisis. "If I fail, the FDIC shuts me down," he said. Then he gestured at a big-bank CEO. "If he fails, the Fed asks how it can help."

It's a telling story. For one thing, it's a reminder that Geithner is the kind of guy who hosts dinners for bankers. He's not a populist; he's allergic to populists, and so are his aides. Behind closed doors, Treasury officials can sound like their MoveOn.org caricatures, griping about "wacko populists" who use "anticapitalist rhetoric" to "extract their pound of flesh from the Street" — even making excuses for the megabankers who no-showed a recent White House meeting with Obama. ("I wouldn't say they blew him off," said one Treasury aide.) Geithner has opposed proposals to tax Wall Street bonuses as well as financial transactions, infuriating the left. And he made quite a few of those how-can-we-help calls to floundering bankers when he was at the Fed, providing a juicy target for the right.

Which is why I opposed Geithner from the beginning.